Net Worth For April

Yet again I did my net worth figures really early and then did absolutely nothing about getting them out in the world. I get really excited when pay day comes around in terms of what that will do to my figures, and want to work my net worth out before my credit card bill gets cleared in full. It’s ridiculous really as in the grand scheme of things it all evens itself out. Maybe when I come to do May’s figures I’ll wait until May is actually done and dusted and then get the figures out quickly. Maybe! So without further ado, here’s my numbers for April.

Debts

Mortgage £87,696.45

Assets

Cash £17,028.49

Money in sharesave £10,804

AVC’s £3,937.57

Shares £35,360.54

House £228,000

Total Assets £295,130.60

Net Worth including house equity

£295,130.60 – £87,696.45 = £207,434.15

Net Worth excluding house equity

£67,130.60 – £87,696.45 = -£20,565.85

A few things have occurred to me about my net worth figures. The first is that I just use the price that I paid for the house as the house value. A quick look at Zoopla shows that actually they say it’s worth £245k instead of the £228k figure that I’m using. Now I could change that, adjusting it each month depending on what Zoopla has to say. Here in Scotland house prices seem to be relatively stable (well outside of Edinburgh and other major hot spots), so the Zoopla figure might not jump around all that much. Saying that, I’ve not intention of moving any time soon, and I don’t really give too much credence to my net worth figure including the house equity, as unless I sell up and buy somewhere much smaller then as an asset it’s not all that much use. As a lovely home to bring my kids up in though it’s invaluable. I’ll see what Zoopla say next month when I come to do my figures. If the value has stayed the same I might just use the higher figure and stick with that.

The other major thing that’s sticking out to me when I work out my figures is my pension. So I include the AVC’s that I choose to pay into, but I don’t have anything in there at all to reflect my defined benefits pension. If I can stick work out till I’m 60 then that will be worth £10k a year to me, so really that has to show up in my net worth somewhere. Even if I was to leave work now that pension would still be sitting there waiting for me and worth about £5k a year at 60. I’ve been doing a bit of reading up on this, and I really think I need to start including some sort of a figure in there for the pension. So even if I used the current figure of £5k a year, if I was to receive that for 25 years then that’s worth £125k. And quite frankly I’m planning on living till I’m 100 – so that’s a very conservative estimate! I need to have that showing somewhere.

I’ve tried adding it in to my net worth figures, and it certainly makes my little pie chart look a lot more balanced than it has been up to this point. I couldn’t help feeling that adding it in was cheating though. I can’t quite work out why I feel like that, as this is definitely money that I’ll have access to. I think I might feel wrong about adding this in because as it’s a non-contributory pension I somehow don’t feel like I’ve earned the right to include it. I definitely have though, as there’s been lots of blood, sweat and tears involved over the last 18 years of working there. If anybody has any thoughts on how to handle this please let me know below. All suggestions gratefully received.

Things seem to be going generally in the right direction. I’m getting close to being only £20k away from being able to clear the mortgage if I cashed everything in. I’ve got enough equity in the house that if I needed/wanted to I could sell up and buy myself a decent house outright and be happily mortgage free. The mortgage is still a lot bigger than I would like it to be. It definitely feels that it’s weighing me down a lot. I’m delighted that I should be able to make an additional overpayment to the mortgage at the end of this month as a result of me finally getting the hang of and getting on with matched betting. Let’s hope my money making continues with matched betting and that allows me to keep chipping away at the mortgage. I know it doesn’t make sense for me to be clearing my mortgage as quickly as I can when I’m only paying base rate interest, but it’s good for my soul to be getting rid of it. Money shouldn’t be an emotional thing, but sometimes it is, and for me being rid of my mortgage is something I really want to achieve sooner rather than later.

So the same things still apply to my finances as ever. To say I need to rejig my investments is the understatement of the century. My next job is to change my instructions on my shares so that the dividends no longer get automatically reinvested in new shares. Instead I’ll take the dividend money and invest in index trackers. This year and next year I have sharesaves maturing, so I’ll buy and immediately sell and again put that money in index trackers. Then I’ll keep an eye on the share price (as though I’m not already obsessively checking it every few hours at work!) and when it’s at a decent level I’ll offload the shares that are available for me to sell and which aren’t in an ISA. That will still leave me too many of my work shares in the ISA, but at least I’ll be a bit more balanced and I will work on moving things around a bit more in the future.

It was pay day the other day, and this got me thinking how different people who are striving for FIRE are to the rest of the population. Now don’t get me wrong, I look forward to pay day. Well actually not pay day itself, the couple of days before when the payslips are available. I like to plug my pay and sharesave figures into my spreadsheets and see the figures go up the way. The actual money in the bank does nothing for me. I’m not planning on spending it anyway, or as little as possible, so what does it matter if I’ve been paid? I moved teams a few months ago and my boss asked me a week or so after pay day if I’d got paid ok with the team change on the system. I had to tell him that I had no idea as I hadn’t actually checked my bank account. My bank account gets checked twice a month, once when the statement comes in to make sure all the transactions are correct and once when I’m doing my net worth figures. I don’t think he could quite believe that I had no idea if I’d been paid or not. Most people are waiting for the money to hit the account so that they can get spending. My equivalent is “brilliant, more money saved and more money towards the mortgage”.

There seems to have been a bit of an explosion of holiday booking in the office recently. There’s also been lots of chat about opening interest free credit cards to pay for these holidays. We’re all reasonably well paid (well, you know, none of us have to worry about higher rate tax, but we’re not exactly minimum wage either) and we all got a bonus last month. Despite this, people are taking out credit cards to pay for far flung holidays. Now I like a holiday as much as the next person, but I’m certainly not going in to debt to pay for a fortnight in paradise.

Now bear in mind that I’ve worked with most of these people for five years now. We were a brand new department set up so we all started at the same time. Most of us came from within the same organisation and had come from a call centre role. So basically for most of us our salaries have pretty much doubled in half a decade. So we’ve been used to living on a pretty low wage, got a big bump up in the salary and had some steady increases ever since. And yet still most people are spending on credit cards and juggling from one pay day to the next. OK, so five years is quite a long time. During that time as a department we’ve seen marriages, divorces, births, deaths and everything in between. Peoples’ lives have changed dramatically. But if they’d stayed in their previous jobs I’m pretty sure they would have been doing that same limp from one pay day to the next. So where has that huge increase in the salary gone?

Inevitably people have bought bigger houses (guilty as charged!), upgraded their cars, upgraded their significant others(!), gone on fancier holidays and generally spent money on unnecessary rubbish. It’s really got me thinking though. What if we didn’t do that whole lifestyle inflation thing? What if we just kept living like we were when we first started working? Now when I got my first job straight out of uni I was back living with mum and dad to try and pay my debts off, so I’m not sure I fancy going down that route again. But still, it’s something to think about. No matter how much you try and resist the insidious creep of lifestyle inflation, it somehow gets its grip on you.

I was speaking to a customer the other day that epitomised this whole increase in spending inclination for me. I was taking her income details and she was on about £35K a year, so about £3.5k more than me. She was more or less my age too so already I was thinking about the similarities between us and starting to compare our finances. Don’t judge me, the days drag sometimes so I have to do something to keep me amused. Then we start to talk about her husband and he’s on £120k a year. Suddenly not quite so similar after all.

But you know what, despite their income being five times mine, my finances were in a much better place than theirs. They were on an interest only mortgage, with their only way of paying it off being to sell the house a bit further down the line. They had massive credit card debts and rather predictably a huge overdraft. No savings, obviously. It beggars belief that a couple with such a great income could have made such bad decisions to find themselves in such a situation. Except she didn’t think there was an issue. Despite being just one paycheck away from financial disaster she honestly thought that was a normal position to be in. I’d like to say that this is the exception, but sadly I talk to people like this all the time. I want to shout down the phone at them to explore FIRE, as they could be there in no time. Instead I chat politely and agree that it’s difficult to find any spare money to put in savings. Unbelievable.

So not too much lifestyle inflation for me. I’ll continue to overpay my mortgage, keep my costs under control as best I can and keep investing. Trying to increase my income will continue to be vital for my FIRE success. I’m delighted with how I’m getting on with Matched Betting. I’ve got myself into a little routine of sitting down with the laptop when I get in from work and making myself some money. I quite enjoy doing it, and whilst I don’t think I’ll be retiring from my day job any time soon, it will hopefully continue to boost the coffers and bring me that bit closer to Financial Independence and skipping down the happy path to early retirement. Here’s hoping anyway.

Update on April Goals and I May Set New Goals

So it’s time to see how I got on working towards the goals that I set myself for April. Here’s a bit of a reminder about what I was hoping to achieve during the month.

Get down to under 27 minutes for my local park run. PASS. I’m really happy with this one. Considering I had this as one of my goals for March too when I miserably failed to achieve it, this is doubly sweet. With working alternate Saturdays I only have two chances in the month to do parkrun, and in April for one of those Saturdays I was down south and so not doing my local course. So that only left one opportunity to get under 27 minutes. I’m delighted that I managed to do it in 26.23. I was really going for it and I was determined to get under that 27 minute mark. It’s still a little bit off my PB, but it was by far my best time in well over a year. It just goes to show what you can do when you put your mind to it. I’d been doing a bit more training, but not enough to really make a significant difference. The crucial thing was my attitude. I went for it from the get go and was focussed on my time all the way around.

Get my weight to 10 stone 9 pounds. PASS/FAIL. I’m not quite sure how to judge this one. I did get down to 10 stone 8 and a half pounds, so technically this should be a pass. But then Easter happened. And then reduced price Easter eggs happened. It wasn’t pretty. Tasty, but a touch unhealthy. So I haven’t got back on the scales, but I am pretty confident in predicting that I am no longer under 10 stone 9 pounds. I think I need to be a bit more specific about future goals in terms of maintaining a specific weight.

Start Matched Betting. PASS. Finally I’ve got going on this one. A bit of a mixed bag in term of how successful I was, but I seem to have got the hang of it now and am making some good progress on this one.

Read at least one book. PASS. I’ve smashed this one out of the water. I have deliberately made sure not to start any new boxsets and this is definitely having an impact on the amount that I’m reading. Also the fact that I’ve almost completely come off the dreaded Facebook means I’m reading on my breaks at work, in the evening and in bed before I go to sleep. So I actually ended up reading five books – a couple of trashy quick reads and three old favourites.

I read Second Chance by Jane Green which was an easy read and pretty entertaining. Next up was The Real Thing by Catherine Alliott. This was definitely a ‘put your brain in neutral whilst you read’ book, but sometimes that’s just what’s needed. Writing that has just prompted me to pull it off the shelf ready to get rid of it. Next up was The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. This one is a real feast for the senses. My mum got it for me for Christmas a few years ago. I’ve got the hardback version with black edged pages, which feels really special to be reading. The story is great and I got even more from it reading it a second time. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen is another one that was a gift and that I’ve read before. I couldn’t really remember the beginning part of it, but the further I got in to it the more I started to remember. It’s another good read and a nice long book with plenty to get your teeth in to. The last one I finished in April was an old favourite, Family Life by Elisabeth Luard. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve read this book. It’s autobiographical, based on the author’s family life funnily enough. They lived in a number of different places, so it’s a really interesting read and you really feel like you get to know the family. There’s a real sting in the tail with this book, so it’s one that I always dread reading in a sense as I know the heart wrenching sob inducing part is coming at the end. It hasn’t stopped me reading it over the years though as it’s such a feel good book.

I’ve hatched a bit of a plan to read all of the books on my bookshelves again. I did this once when I was in my early twenties, and it took me a while then. The intervening years certainly haven’t made that task any shorter. I reckon that if I read a couple of books a week it will take me at least five years to get through all my books. Hopefully it will prompt me to get rid of any that I don’t fancy reading again, and it will certainly give me something to do when I’m working towards FIRE! That’s not a goal by the way. That’s a bit too long term for me, and I don’t want to start thinking of reading as a chore that I need to do.

List some more items on Ebay, using the Buy it now method this time. PASS. I definitely listed some DVD’s on Ebay using Buy it now, and they sold. I have to be honest though that my interest in eBay has waned somewhat since I started with the old Matched Betting. I made almost nothing with Ebay, and ok so I actually lost money with MB, but in the grand scheme of things Matched Betting is definitely the way to go.

So actually looking at how I got on with my goals for April I think I did pretty well. With the exception of my weight, where I achieved my goal but then sabotaged myself with excessive Easter egg eating, it was a success across the board with the goals that I’d set myself. It’s funny because when I think about April it doesn’t really feel like things went all that well. I think I probably coasted along for a fair part of the month and then pulled it out of the bag right at the end. Even my parkrun time was done right at the arse end of the month.

I think the issue might be that things that I’d got a grip on are starting to slip again. So my sleeping patterns are absolutely shocking at the moment, and I’m back to feeling constantly exhausted. I had got to the point where I was more or less getting seven hours sleep a night and feeling much better for it. I was making sure that I ate five portions of fruit and veg a day and generally looking after myself. Maybe I got a bit complacent. I’ve stopped using my fruit and veg tracker and I ignore the entreaties from my sleep tracker to go to bed.

In my defence (there is no defence) I finished with the guy that I had been seeing and I’ve taken that as a bit of an excuse to go off the rails. It was absolutely the right decision for me to make, but still you have to be a bit nice to yourself when these things happen. Although maybe eating crap and not sleeping enough is not being that nice to myself. So I think maybe it could be time to have a word with myself and get my health under control. I’ve already started trying to focus a bit more on my running, so eating and sleeping better can only help with that.

So it’s time to think about what I want to achieve in May. I think there’ll be some common themes in here, but as we’ve seen from my shocking self-sabotage in terms of my health, I need to keep my focus on the important areas of my life. So without further ado, this is what I want to do in May.

Get my local park run time down to 25.50 which would be a PB. This is going to be a challenging one for me. I’ll be able to do two parkruns this month, but the first one is on a day I have a charity running challenge at lunchtime, so I really need to take it easy at parkrun that day. So we’ll see how I get on. I’ve got some good training sessions coming up with my running club which should help with this goal.

Get my weight down to ten and a half stone, and keep it there till the end of the month. This should be realistic for me. It will really depend if I can get my head in the right place. I’ve of the mind set just now of eating all the food that exists in the world. That needs to change.

Start using my fruit and veg tracker again and have at least five fruit and veg portions a day for at least 20 days out of the month. I was easily achieving this previously, so I’m hoping this will be a habit that is relatively easy to reintroduce.

Get at least seven hours sleep a night during May. I’m not entirely convinced about how successful I’m going to be with this one, but it honestly can’t go any worse than it did in April. This is actually a really important goal for me. If I’m going to have sufficient energy to achieve my goals then I need to be getting enough sleep.

Continue Matched Betting and make £200 profit by the end of May. I’m hoping that this is more than realistic. By the end of today I will have made back the money I lost from my stupid mistake on my first bet and also covered the cost of my OddsMonkey subscription. So if I keep on as I’m doing just now then £200 should be more than achievable. I’m hoping for more than this moving forward, but I don’t want to put pressure on myself. If I make more then fantastic, if not then it’s all extra cash. It’s all getting allocated to mortgage overpayments so that I don’t get used to the extra money coming in. No lifestyle inflation for me.

Read at least two books. Hopefully I’ll read more than this, but I’ll make this a nice achievable one as I’ve got quite a few other things that are tough for me to work on.

So I think that’s more than enough for me to be working on. Many of my goals are back to basics for me. Sleep and what I’m eating are crucial for me to feel good enough to pursue my dreams. If I can get those things right then I’ll be in a good place to achieve my other more stretching goals. The parkrun PB target is going to be a tough one, but there’s no reason why I can’t achieve this if I really go for it. If I get my fruit and veg eating back on track I should be able to lose the Easter egg weight and get to where I want to be.

In terms of FIRE I think that Matched Betting is the key to this whole thing. Most of my spending, saving and investing is all automated and happens without me needing to think too much about it. I’m sure there are more things that I could be doing, but just for now I’m reasonably happy with my level of spending, I’ve got some tweaks I need to make later in the year with my investments, but for now I think things are ticking along quite nicely. So what I really need to do is increase my income and hammer away at my mortgage, as that is the thing that is really dragging me down. It will be interesting to see what my profit for Matched Betting looks like after a full month. I’ll let you know how I get on, and if anyone has any hints and tips for me then feel free to comment below. All suggestions gratefully received!